George Santos' latest FEC filing an 'indecipherable mess': report

18 April 2023

On Monday, April 17, Rep. George Santos (R-New York) announced that he plans to seek reelection in 2024 — an announcement that surprised his detractors in light of all the criticism the embattled Queens/Long Island congressman has received for the many lies he told during his 2022 campaign. That announcement came two days after Santos, on April 15, filed a report with the Federal Election Commission (FEC).

That report, according to Daily Beast reporter Roger Sollenberger, raises questions about Santos' finances. One of them, according to Sollenberger, is: "How, and now when, did he loan his campaign hundreds of thousands of dollars?"

Sollenberger, in an article published by the Beast on April 18, explains, "In the report, which was filed with the Federal Election Commission on Saturday, the campaign claimed that over the first three months of the year, it refunded more donations than it received — likely a side effect of the general public’s aversion to the scandal-swamped congressional freshman, a feeling his donors share….The campaign also reported spending a grand total of zero dollars ($0.00) in that same time period, which, while unusual for any active campaign, represents an extraordinary departure from Santos' previous profligacy. The flat expenses also raise questions of whether the campaign failed to properly account for services it used over the period, such as legal counsel or FEC compliance."

According to Brendan Fischer of the watchdog group Documented, the figures in Santos' FEC report defy logic and are an "indecipherable mess."

Fischer told the Daily Beast, "These kinds of calculations and debt discrepancies are going to be a big red flag for the FEC's reports and analysis division. I'd expect them to ask Santos why these reports don't make any sense."

Jordan Libowitz, communications director for Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), also used the words "red flag" when discussing Santos' FEC filing with the Beast.

According to Libowitz, "If you take this at face value, that means Santos artificially inflated the amount of money in his campaign for months, then actually fulfilled that loan months and months later. So, the dates and amounts of funding for his campaign were previously untrue, across several reports."

Santos' detractors have been calling for him to resign from Congress, but he has made it clear that he plans to serve out the rest of his term. The congressman has drawn widespread condemnation for lying about a long list of things during his 2022 campaign.

Santos falsely claimed that his grandparents were Holocaust survivors and that his mother, Fatima Caruso Devolder, was in the World Trade Center on 9/11 — which would have been impossible because, according to the Washington Post, records show that she was in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil at the time.

Read the Daily Beast's full report at this link(subscription required).

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